snydeq writes: "Yesterday's Compute Engine announcement at Google I/O made it clear that Google intends to take Amazon EC2 head on. Michael Crandell, who has been testing out Compute Engine for some time now, divulges deeper insights into the nascent IaaS, which, although enticing, will have a long road ahead of it in eclipsing Amazon EC2. 'Even in this early stage, three major factors about Google Cloud stood out for Crandell. First was the way Google leveraged the use of its own private network to make its cloud resources uniformly accessible across the globe.... Another key difference was boot times, which are both fast and consistent in Google's cloud.... Third is encryption. Google offers at-rest encryption for all storage, whether it's local or attached over a network. "Everything's automatically encrypted," says Crandell, "and it's encrypted outside the processing of the VM so there's no degradation of performance to get that feature."'"